


the reveries

by velificatio



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Body Horror, Cannibalism, Dreams and Nightmares, Experimental Style, Forced Suicide, Gen, Premature Burial, Suicide, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-03-06 19:27:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3145841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velificatio/pseuds/velificatio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of reoccurring nightmares borne from a man who once spent a lifetime dreaming by the sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. number 5

Grand hotels rise and fall regularly in the world. There are a multitude of ways to display opulence and luxury; with new forms appearing on a yearly basis. Inevitably hotels begin to resemble the transition stages of empires: infancy, peak, decline, and deconstruction. With each stage traces of the previous linger beneath the framework. A keen observer can find remnants of a golden age amongst the heaviest layer of dust and debris. And some have no choice but to play witness to the cycle.

This is case of a butterfly koi, whose home is and has always been a lavish fountain at the center of a resort hotel. Once the waters flowed through its statues clearly as tears, the marble was polished and white. But that was at the peak. Now is the stage of deconstruction and rustic fluid continues to pour through the cracked skull of a defaced figurine. There is only one koi in the fountain. This koi is called Saito.

An elderly man taps his walking stick over rocks and columns as he makes his way towards the fountain. Once there he observes Saito in silence. Saito swims in circles, round and round the winding fountain. He swims in indifference to the man’s gaze. In obliviousness until he caught in a clear plastic bag. The water held with him is brown and peppered with paint chippings and leaves.

“Blessed am I for this gift.” the old man says and takes his bag and Saito away.

There is a moment lost in this transition, a phantom phase set between decay and destruction. It passes unnoticed.

Saito is laid out on ivory dinner plate. He is placed on his side and has but one eye to look about and see more than darkness. What he sees is the old man seated in front of him. Who he sees is himself as an old man. Koi Saito sees Elder Saito perceiving himself as a butterfly koi and being perceived in turn. They are waiting in solitude until they are alone no longer.

A woman sits at the dinner table, she wears a dark glittering evening gown and a blank wooden mask over her face. Next comes a group of young children, clothed in black. They are all masked, featureless.

“Is it time to begin?” The woman asks, the French lit of her voice lightly pronounced.

As an old man Saito nods, weary. As a koi Saito flutters his gills to no avail.

On each side of the dinning plate rests a knife. One is bright silver, pristine and new. The other jagged, weathered.  With these knives Elder Saito dissects koi Saito, careful to leave the skeletal frame intact. Koi Saito feels himself being divided into slits of skinned flesh, Elder Saito’s breathing labors as he passes out slices of the koi to the children until there is no more meat to remove.

The woman nods. “See how lovely it is, this gift?”

“Yes.” Elder Saito says, and collapses dead, face first into the dining plate.


	2. number 4

Art, like violence, is a spectator’s game. What is seen in the mind or with the eye is replicated into tangible form. The audience in turn consumes and interprets the visuals to each individual’s needs. Museums are the intellectual coliseums of their day. Masses flock from far and wide; stay until they are satiated.

Exhibit 31;  _The Metamorphosis of Daichi (to Saito)_  is housed alongside Dali’s  _The Persistence of Memory_  in the Museum of Modern Art. A seven foot glass case holds the subject’s frame from head to torso. Daichi’s arms are suspended by hemp nooses tied at the wrist; the stumps where his hands should be charred black. Fly amanita has sprouted in vivid colors about his flesh and his severed tongue lies in the bottom of the case with a water lily placed on it. Daichi’s open mouth is a black hole. He does not speak but still inhales, inhales, sucking all the filtered oxygen occasionally pumped into his case.

A hand, deathly pale and painted grey at the fingertips, brushes the case in reverence. It is cold as winter frost but the man does not recoil as so many who’ve touched Daichi’s lair have. Instead he leans in, pressing his soft mouth against the glass. When he withdraws a transparent impression of his lips lingers.

“I’m a collector you know.” He tells Daichi, a low whisper. As though this is a secret between them. “Of all information. But I never ask for any of it; I pry and I steal. A gentleman thief almost.”

Daichi feels the phantom ache in his arms, radiating from the stumps on his wrists. Through the cracks of his burned skin he begins to bleed.

The man continues. “You are exquisite. And I –“

Blood drips steadily onto the water lily. What was once black is now spotted with red.

“I’d like to steal you.”


	3. number 3

Fundamental to the aspect of progression is one’s ability to remain in motion.  _They moved forward_ , we say when candlelight gives way to electricity. The horse drawn carriage evolves into the modern automobile. By this view stillness becomes weakness. To remain stationary is to be backwards, primitive. Years turn to centuries, humans grow until they die, the sun falls before the face of the moon. In all these events motion is paramount.

What is the fate of those who witness the act of progress yet themselves remain unchanged?

An answer might lie in the anomaly of a three foot boulder which rolls steadily down a single blood soaked carpet. Where this carpet is housed is only secondary in importance. Perhaps our stone tumbles through the halls of a manor, or hurdles endlessly round the circles of hell free at last from the burden of Sisyphus’ grip. There is little to be gained from setting apart from the fact that its location is stagnant. The setting is not a center of progress and neither is the boulder. Who this ageless rock encounters; therein lies the stage of evolution.

The stone is not perpetually in motion. On several occasions it is stopped for a time, forced to bear the weight of another who casts their hopes, fears, and confessions onto its sandy surface as though it were a holy monolith.

“They are to bury me by the light of Sol Invictus.” A priestess clad in white robes tells the boulder. She is not yet dead and will remain breathing until the suffocating pressure of dirt and rumble robs her breath. “I ask for no absolution. Goddess be praised, I ne’er felt so holy as when we were in rapture.”

Further down the carpet a concubine appears. She bends gracefully to sit beside the stone, heedless to the stains of red smudging her gowns.

“He who reigns over all under heaven has passed,” she says in whispers, “So too shall my time come to a close. There are but four of us left. I’m told the rope shall be tied so tight I’ll not feel the strain.”

This woman lingers for some time; departs with the hesitance of life wishing not to drown.

It makes no difference to the boulder. Cold and silent, it continues onward.

A woman dressed in violet moving like running paint, like Galatea with one shoe halts the stone.

“We were each other’s half. Perhaps that’s why he came unwelcome into my most precious retreat. How can you truly form a whole if you do not know the other’s deepest fears and desires?" She drapes herself over the boulder. " His love became a noose around my throat.”

Her fingers smooth over cracked edges.

“Let me tell you a riddle. You’re waiting for a train…”


	4. number 2

At times absence can be a gift, in others a disease. Dilapidation of a structure begins with neglect, a failure to treat the house properly or to handle it at all. There are many homes a child can create in their mind. Some are visited often, taken shelter in with love. Other doors are seldom opened and a place used to house fear, anger, begins to rot and mirror the darkest emotions of its creator. Parasite meeting host.

Daichi is eight years old, his mind impressively keen and his posturing that of a man twice his age. In truth he is not an average child; he is a fallen prince. And fallen princes are not raised to pursue their own dreams and passions, they are raised to reclaim glory. To align their ambitions with those who came before them in a dynasty built on expansion, on conquest.

In his imagination Daichi builds a house to keep all the interests and wishes he will soon cast aside. It is a two-story complex, unassuming in appearance. Inside he fills the spaces quickly. A book on human psychology, test vials for lab experiments, clothing he will never own, paintings of the stars and planets.

 After a year Daichi creates a copy of himself, and leaves his double to live inside the house. On the second year he locks him inside the home where paint is beginning to chip off and little pockets of sand have collected in the corners and stairway. He closes off that section of his mind, in time it is forgotten entirely.

Decades later, when he washes up on the shores of an infinite realm, Daichi will see this house again. Sitting atop a cliff overlooking the beach, held up by massive stones. He will look inside its windows to find its interior nearly engulfed in sand.  What trinkets and art pieces he is able see do not bring any emotion with them. Daichi can no longer recall why he placed an hourglass atop a bookshelf, what led him to smash blood vials into pieces.

He will not enter the home. Ignoring the scratching noise at the door, the occasional small silhouette he sees on the walls, Daichi builds a fire and burns the house down. In its ashes he constructs a grand palace seen only in dreams. Impeccably kept, towering over the coastline. And in its halls he comes to know an illness defined by lacking.

When a man filled with radical notions enters his castle he will call this disease regret. Before Daichi reaches for the gun he hears a distinctive scratching sound. The crack of a gunshot silences it.


	5. number 1

In the months before our births we are surrounded in the water of the womb, from which we emerge uncurled and wailing. Perhaps the most fitting method of being laid to rest then is a burial at sea. 

He has seen the moment of his death glimmering of the reflection of a dozen mirrors, known the sand if these shores have been kissed by his blood, his lifeless body. The mirrors, circling around the two rocks where they are always seated, bear a varying amount of rust and grime. A clear reflection of a life in stages that has brought him to this beach. A pivotal act hedged on a game of chance. 

As always she sits across from him, shrouded in white. He has never needed to see her face nor hear her speak to know who she was. To recall her serpentine form moving through the dining room of a castle built in a dream. This could be one as well, or a vision of is someday to come.

She loads the revolver in her lap with one, golden bullet. Spins the cylinder. When the muzzle presses against her veil, when the first click sounds, it isn’t her round.

“Has it become redundant yet?” She asks, coy as she hands him the gun. “Have you begun to memorize the clicking, to know before you squeeze the trigger that it's the one?”

Saito brushes sand off his hands. “If I had, why would we still be doing this?”

“Perhaps you need to feel that even this, is something you can conquer?”

He has no answer for that.

His posture, already upright, straightens further. The folly of it, to try and temper such a violent death with grace, is not lost on her. Saito pulls the trigger. Not his round.

“Your dignity will not go with you when the waves claim your corpse.” She says. “You will bloat, and decay even in those waters. There is no refuge from the ugliness of death.”

Her second click seems a touch louder than the first. Or perhaps he imagines it to be. 

“I am not seeking refuge.” Saito tells her as he takes back the revolver, casting a glance at their reflections in the mirrors. 

She hums, amused. “You answered so many questions just now. We are making progress.”

Progress towards what? Saito does not speak his question aloud, and will not have the luxury of time to. He pulls the trigger, feels at first a burst of heat, a moment of blinding pain, and then nothing. A little death claims him once more.


End file.
